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Giselle and the Wilis by Jane Pritchard
Giselle was premiered at the Théâtre de l'Academie royale de musique (the old Paris Opéra in the rue Peletier) on June 28, 1841. The choreography was officially credited to Jean Coralli but much of it, particularly for Giselle herself, was by Jules Perrot. The sets were designed by Pierre Ciceri and costumes by Paul Lormier. The original cast included Carlotta Grisi (Giselle), Lucien Petipa (Albrecht) and Adèle Dumiâtre (Myrtha).
Giselle was the idea of the poet and critic, Théophile Gautier, who was looking for a vehicle to display the talents of a young dancer at the Paris Opéra, Carlotta Grisi. This was the first time Gautier had developed a scenario for a ballet and thus enlisted the aid of the more experienced Jules-Henri Vernoy de Saint-Georges.
The work was to be very much in the fashionable Romantic style and was influenced by the two-act structure of La Sylphide. Apart from the general romantic influences on a universally popular theme of love beyond death, there were two specific sources for Giselle . Firstly there was the poem, Fantômes , published in the volume Les Orientales by the romantic writer Victor Hugo in 1829. This told of a Spanish girl who, as the poem says, 'was overfond of dancing and that killed her'. Secondly there was the legend of the wilis, which attracted attention through the writings of Heinrich Heine (1797-1856). Beaumont in The Ballet called Giselle refers to Meyer's Konversationslexikon which defines the Wiles or Wilis as a species of vampire consisting of the spirits of betrothed girls who have died as a result of their being jilted by faithless lovers.
In discussing the sources of the ballet Gautier himself wrote: "I came across a charming passage... where you speak of elves in white dresses, whose hems are always damp; of nixes who display their little satin feet on the ceiling of the nuptial chamber; of snow-coloured Wilis who waltz pitilessly; and of those delicious apparitions you have encountered in the Harz mountains and on the banks of the Ilse, in a mist softened by German moonlight; and I involuntarily said to myself: "Wouldn't this make a pretty ballet?"
In fact Heine wrote in an article which appeared in the French newspaper, Europe Literaire in 1833 and later in his book About Germany (Uber Deutschland or De l'Allemagne ): "In parts of Austria there is a legend about ghostly girl dancers known as 'the Wilis'. The Wilis are brides who have died before their wedding. The poor young creatures cannot lie quiet in their graves; in their dead hearts, in their dead feet, they preserve that craving to dance that they were unable to satisfy in their lives. At midnight they rise, gather in groups upon the highways and woe betide the young man who meets them. They make him dance, encircling him with unbridled abandon, dance without rest, until he falls dead. Arrayed in their wedding garments, wreaths of flowers and fluttering ribbons on their heads, sparkling rings on their fingers the Wilis dance in the moonlight, just like elves. Their faces, though white as snow, are young and beautiful; their laughter is horribly gay, their friendliness evil they beckon with such secret desire, such promise - they are irresistible."
The country folk around those parts couldn't face the fact that youth and beauty can drop so suddenly and completely into black annihilation, and so quite spontaneously the belief arose that after her death, a bride will yearn and seek for those pleasures of which she had been deprived in her life.
Mary Skeaping's production of Giselle
Mary Skeaping (1902-1984) learnt Giselle in 1925 as a dancer in Anna Pavlova's Company and also danced in it for the Camargo Ballet Society, and the Markova-Dolin Ballet.
Skeaping went on to mount six different versions of Giselle, gradually researching and restoring as much of the ballet and its music as she could. This includes the controversial fugue in Act II in which Myrtha sends wave after wave of wilis to try and lure Albrecht from the safety of the cross on Giselle's grave. Skeaping regarded the action during the fugue as central to the conflict between the supernatural and the religious. The myrtle branch, symbol of the Queen's strength, is broken and Giselle constantly tries to thwart Myrtha's authority.
In the 1950s Skeaping undertook research at the Archives of the Paris Opéra where she discovered the original score, enabling her to restore sections that had been missing for decades. She learnt as much of the ballet's mime (as performed by the Imperial Russian Ballet) as possible from the great ballerina, Tamara Karsavina, and she included much of this in her productions.
Skeaping tried to give the 19th century romantic ballet a logic that is meaningful for audiences more than a century later. She accepted the designer Hein Heckroth's suggestion to use the German custom of designating selected cottages as places for wine tasting during the harvest to give a logic to the Royal party stopping at Giselle's home.
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